


most ardently

by badraph



Category: DCU (Comics)
Genre: M/M, jason todd's super secret stash of bad erotica, that dick stumbles upon on accident
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-30
Updated: 2018-01-30
Packaged: 2019-03-11 13:20:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13525143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badraph/pseuds/badraph
Summary: A trashy Superman romance novel. He's holding a trashy Superman romance novel. Jason Todd owns a trashy Superman romance novel.





	most ardently

**Author's Note:**

> i reread outsiders and dick is such a dick in that it made me want something lighthearted and dumb  
> im very sleep deprived no one hold me accountable for this

Steph calls at five in the morning.

Dick is in the process of peeling off his uniform, eyeing his bed and the concept of sleeping until long past a socially acceptable hours with almost hedonistic levels of want, every one of his bones aching from a few days' missed sleep and a long, _long_ night. He makes sure to finish the petulant half-groan, half-sob he lets off when he sees her name flashing on his phone before he answers.

“Stephanie,” he starts calmly, all ready to go into a lecture about the dangers of using unsecure lines for contact, but she interrupts with a panicked barrage.

“I know, I know, I know!” She sounds panicked enough that Dick shuts his mouth and stands up a little straighter. “My comm got crushed and this was all I had and—ugh! Hang on.” She moves away from the phone, her voice faint enough that Dick has to strain to hear. “Yes, I _actually_ called him!” A low rumble in the background—someone else talking? “What?! No! Do you _want_ to die?!”

“Stephanie,” Dick says, then, louder when she continues bickering with whoever is in the room instead of answering, “Steph!”

“Yes, hi,” she replies, speaking into the phone again. “Please help me. I'm sending you the address.”

“Steph,” he says again with forced calm. “What the hell is going on?”

“It's—hold on. No. _No._ Stop. Stop it! Are you crazy?! Stop _moving_ , oh my _GOD_! Let me—” Steph yelps and there are the shuffling sounds of a struggle.

“Steph!” Dick yells as he rushes to put his uniform back on, hurrying to the window even though he has no idea where to go. “What's happening?!”

“I already texted it to him, you maniac!” he hears her yell over the interference, then a pained grunt from who he assumes is her assailant. “Would you _please_ just—” The line goes dead.

Her text comes in a few seconds later—an address Dick thinks he recognizes apartment complex on the East End. The message trails off into random letters halfway through like someone was trying to wrestle the phone away from her.

Dick doesn't think he's ever moved so fast in his _life_.

 

* * *

 

He's is halfway through picking the lock on the balcony door when it flies open, ripping the pick out of his hand and sending him into an automatic backflip into a more advantageous position at the surprise. The load that drops off his shoulders when he sees it's Steph standing in the doorway leaves Dick almost lightheaded.

“Steph,” he starts, hopping off the railing, then notices her sleeves bunched up to her elbows, the blood on her hands, and the rest of the sentence dies in his throat.

His shock must be written all over his face because Stephanie holds up her bloody hands ( _not_ a comfort) and says, “I swear to god I didn't kill anyone.”

“ _Steph_ ,” he grits out for what feels like the thousandth time. “What the _hell_ is going on?”

“Gotham Sixes,” Stephanie begins. She waves him inside, shuts the door behind them, and begins leading him through the sparse apartment. “Small timers. You probably haven't even heard of them.” He has, but that's beside the point. “They were making some stupid move against a bigger gang tonight—gonna get themselves wiped out, I swear, stupid kids—so I was there to bust it up, but I wasn't the only one, and, well.” She stops as they enter the last door on the hallway and the rest of the story tells itself in the form of Jason Todd slowly bleeding to death on a folding cot.

He stops what he's doing—which appears to be shoving gauze at the wound on his stomach like it'll soak up the concept of the injury if he just keeps it coming—and stares at Dick for only a second before he snaps his gaze to Steph and says, “I hate you.”

“Literally saved your life,” she deadpans. “You're _so_ welcome.”

Jason grunts and goes back to pointlessly killing cotton plants by rolling out some more gauze. “Yeah, yeah,” he mutters vengefully under his breath. “Wait 'till I get this fixed. We'll see who's saving who.”

“That doesn't even make any—” Stephanie cuts herself off with a sharp exhale, then turns to Dick. “You know what? I changed my mind. Let's leave him to die.”

Dick pinches the bridge of his nose to try and deter the oncoming headache.

“Typical,” Jason says. “I try to make nice with a Bat, I end up missing half my blood and left behind to die.” He throws his arms dramatically up in the air, which can't be great for his injuries, but Dick's come to understand, over the past few months, that Jason will pick making a scene over breathing every time. “ _Typical_!” he shouts to the ceiling.

Dick briefly closes his eyes, counts backwards from ten, then brings himself back to earth to look Jason over carefully. He seems lucid enough. It's probably not as bad as he's whining it out to be. God knows Jason dives at any opportunity to complain about his life. Before Dick got to (sort of) know him, the tangents about all his tragedies tore him up. Now he knows the asshole starts waxing poetic every time he gets a splinter just to be a nuisance. So... he _probably_ doesn't have to worry about this being the last thing he ever said to him.

“You got got by the _Sixes_?”

Jason, inexplicably, looks over Dick's shoulder at Stephanie again. “I hate you.”

“Why are you mad at me for something _he_ said?!”

“ _You_ brought him here!”

“Because I have absolutely zero experience digging bullets out of people, you brat!”

“I told you I'd be fine on my own, you little—”

“Okay!” Dick throws up his hands and valiantly steps between them as a human shield, blocking them from each other's sight. “How about we all yell at each other when none of us are bleeding out?”

Steph stands on her tiptoes to squint at Jason over Dick's shoulder. “ _Wonderful_ idea, Dick,” she says. Pointedly. “I am _so_ glad you're here.”

Jason makes an irritated noise and intensifies his glare.

Dick prays for patience. “Do you have a first aid kit?” he asks the room at large.

“Saw one in the bathroom,” Stephanie says, and takes off to, presumably, go and retrieve it.

Jason narrows his eyes at him. “I don't need your help.”

“Well, you're gonna get it,” Dick says with finality, and he's never been so happy for exsanguination fatigue when Jason lets his head fall back onto the pillows with an irritated huff, too tired to fight for once.

Steph comes back in a few seconds later. She shoves a plastic container full of surgical tools into Dick's chest. “Scrub in, Grayson. I'll play nurse.”

“God,” Jason says to the ceiling as Dick's switching out his gloves for a pair of rubber ones, “if you're there, take me again.”

He's been shot twice—once in the gut and once in the hand.

“Which is why I didn't want to leave him on his own,” Steph says. “How was he supposed to properly bandage himself?”

“It's my right hand,” Jason tells her. “I'm left handed.”

“You are not.”

Jason stares at her for a solid five seconds. “Why the fuck would I lie about that?”

“Why would you shoot with your right hand?”

“You shoot with your non-dominant hand to avoid damage from the kickback.” Jason scowls. “Did Bruce seriously not teach you that?”

Steph shrugs. “I'm his least favorite child.”

“Bullshit.” Jason actually seems to take offense to a challenger for his throne of possibly the least coveted title maybe of all time.

Stephanie crosses her arms with a smirk. “ _Real_ shit.”

“Listen here—”

“Would you _please_ sit still,” Dick interrupts from where he's attempting to stitch the wound on Jason's stomach. “You know, Bruce doesn't play favorites, but I do, and you two are squarely at the bottom of my list right now.”

“Yeah, that's easy for the favorite to say,” Steph mutters, and, when Jason laughs, Dick jerks the tweezers a little just to make him yelp.

Somehow, though, they all make it out alive.

Steph doesn't want to leave Jason alone with his injuries despite the fact that none of them were as grisly as they'd looked upon first glance. She's looking a little worse for wear himself, but she's _Stephanie_ , and she's stubborn as hell, so she makes Dick swear he'll stay until the morning or Jason wakes up and kicks him out before she'll go home. She's very adamant about Jason's recovery from such minor wounds. It makes Dick wonder about how, exactly, he got hurt, but he doesn't ask. He agrees—something he's absolutely, no doubt, going to regret when he actually has to deal with a groggy, ever so slightly bloodletted, and, statistically, probably pissed off Jason Todd in the middle of the night.

Dick guesses it at least gives him an opportunity to snoop around that he's certainly not going to pass up on. Stephanie is barely out the door before he starts weaving in and out of the mostly bare rooms of the place to try and shine some light on the still unclear picture of Jason Todd in his head.

There's not much to pick at beyond a few weapons here and there and the fact that there's not a dirty piece of clothing—save the ones they'd peeled off of him to get at his injuries—or anything of the sort anywhere in the house.

Dick finds the laundry hampers in a row behind the couch. Three of them, each filled with clothing of different colors, each with its designation (Lights, Brights, and Darks) cross stitched into its side in a font Dick would expect to see spelling out a lukewarm pun or a bad wisecrack in the home of a suburban mother of three, but here it is displayed across the container of the blood-soaked clothes of one of Gotham's most feared crime lords. He snaps a picture for posterity and keeps moving.

Jason has a bed here, strangely enough, seeing as he's currently sleeping on a cot that looks supremely less comfortable than the queen size Dick finds in one of the rooms. Dick figures, after a while of pondering it and given Jason's obsessive cleanliness and the amount of injuries he surely sustains, he probably bought a backup bed to keep from staining his actual mattress with blood.

It's not a bad idea. Those stains _are_ impossible to get out. Dick considers stealing it before he sits down and levels with himself, facing the reality that he would never in a million years actually commit to cleanliness on that level. He can barely manage _one_ laundry hamper.

Dick's pointless investigation ends on the conclusion that Jason Todd may very well be the illegitimate child of Mr. Clean and that his existence wholly disproves the whole cleanliness-to-godliness correlation. Not much to learn past that.

A fruitless endeavor.

So he finds himself back in the living room he'd first entered through the balcony, perusing the small collection of books ( _meticulously_ arranged) on bookshelf that's just a couple two by fours Jason's nailed to the wall. The bookends sandwiching everything together on this pile of splinters appear to be made of real gold and diamonds.

Dick shakes his head and begins to skim through the titles.

He can't really count himself a fan of most of them. He appreciates the impact that the “classics” had on humanity and society, he guesses, and he's read most of them because, well, a surprising amount of maniacs in masks like to leave behind literature flavored clues, the snobs. But that's about as far as his love for them goes. Based on the dog ears and cracked spines on nearly all of these copies, though, Jason has a very different opinion. Go figure.

Well.

A few things about the dramatic air Jason seems to develop in particularly passionate speeches about morality suddenly make sense, at least.

He plucks _Moby Dick_ from the lineup when he finds it, because there is a small, forever twelve part of him that will never die, and absently thumbs through its pages while he continues scanning the books, planning to flip through it to pass the time once he's satisfied he's turned over all the stones there are to turn here.

 _Paradise Lost, Gone with the Wind, Utopia, Animal Farm_.

Dick's as bored as he ever was in high school English class looking through these—reading on autopilot to the point that he almost misses it.

 _Collected Stories and Poems, Frankenstein, Desires of Steel and Flesh, Of Mice and Men_ —wait.

Dick squeezes his eyes closed for a few seconds just to confirm he's not hallucinating when he pulls the offending book to look at its cover, but it's still there when he opens them again—an overly ripped man on the cover gripping the swooning woman in his arms in front of a wave crashing over the rocks, and oh, god, is that Superman's emblem emblazoned across the man's chest?

 _Desires of_ Steel _and Flesh_.

A trashy Superman romance novel.

He's holding a trashy Superman romance novel.

Jason Todd owns a trashy Superman romance novel.

Years of rigorous training are the only thing keeping Dick from going into some sort of shock-induced coma at the mental image of the Red Hood, one of the most feared presences in the Gotham underworld, coming home at night to read trashy erotica. Probably after meticulously sorting through his laundry for hours on end to make sure nothing gets in the wrong hamper.

You know what? Forget everything he said before.

Today has provided more insight on Jason Todd than Dick could've ever imagined. He'll probably be able to predict Jason's every move in _Criminal Minds_ style montages from now on.

The longer he stares at the cover, the funnier it becomes. A giggle that sounds halfway to hysterical tumbles out before he can stop it. Dick slaps a hand over his mouth, bites his tongue, and blames the sleep deprivation. He slides _Moby Dick_ back into its designated place in favor of his new find because there is a small, forever twelve part of him with an embarrassing crush on Superman and an insatiable curiosity that will _never_ die.

The book's small enough that Dick can slot it into his back pocket for safekeeping while he presses on out of curiosity and investigative thoroughness. He searches the books' spines with purpose, now, and—

 _The Princess and The Raider_ comes next, then _Dark Desires_ , and _His Heart by Midnight_ , and, _god_ , for just a second, Dick really wishes he weren't such a good person so he could go screaming through the streets of Gotham about this _monumental_ discovery without feeling guilty about publicly humiliating Jason.

Heroism has a price.

What are the odds Dick finds a book on this shelf with that exact blurb and a ripped bodice on the cover?

Man.

He speed reads through summaries, snickering to himself. The picture's burned into Dick's head, now—Jason curled up in bed at night reading about damsel after damsel's passion for dark and mysterious bad boys with a hearts of gold. He's clutching a handkerchief to his chest like a swooning lady in a period piece, for some reason. Dick doesn't question it. It adds to the ambiance of the mental image that's gonna be the bedrock of his good mood for weeks to come. It's gonna get him through those cold winter months. And then some.

Dick absently pulls the last book from the row off and opens somewhere in the middle, skimming through the first paragraph he finds while he runs a quick tally in his head. It's strange. If he'd had to guess what kind of authors would be dominating Jason Todd's bookshelf, he probably would've leaned toward the likes of Orwell or Vonnegut. Granted, his entire world view has changed over the past few minutes, but, still.

He never would've pinned Jason as an Austen fan, but classical romance takes up the bulk of the room on his shelves. He seems to prefer heroines to heroes, which raises a new question.

When Jason's reading about these fair maidens being swept off their feet, does he see himself as the sweeper or the _sweepee_?

Dick snaps the book in his hand closed at the thought.

Does Jason Todd want to be _wooed_?

Dick closes his eyes briefly to bask in the perfection of this moment. Jason Todd, the _Red Hood_ , one of the most—if not _the_ most _—_ feared presences in the Gotham underworld, comes home at night to read trashy erotica and daydream about being swept off his feet by a handsome stranger.

Today is a _gift_.

 

* * *

 

 

Dick has walked in on countless people in a myriad of embarrassing situations, but he doesn't think he's ever seen someone's face fall into pure, unadulterated _horror_ quite as fast at Jason's does when he stumbles down the hallway and finds Dick sitting on his couch reading his porn stash like the morning paper.

“Good morning, sunshine!” Dick greets cheerily.

Something in Jason's jaw ticks, and Dick can almost _feel_ him willing him to burst into flames for a few seconds before he grinds out a, “Get your dirty boots off the table.” He tries and fails not to look nervously at the book when Dick snaps it closed and tosses it to occupy the table space his _dirty boots_ vacate. “Why are you here?”

“Making sure you didn't croak on us in your sleep,” Dick tells him with a grin.

For a moment, Jason's looks less like he's angry about finding Dick in his house and more like he's critical of Dick's work as his keeper. He receives an incredibly judgmental once-over. “From all the way in here?”

“I'm very talented,” Dick assures, “but I'll be sure to loom over you while you sleep next time if that'll make you happier.”

Jason scowls down at the ground. “ _Next time_ ,” he mutters irritably under his breath, then turns his glower on Dick. “If there's a next time, I'd rather you just let me die.”

Dick smirks. “Can I have your library if I do?”

If looks could kill. “Get out,” Jason snaps, turning on heel and heading back the way he came. Still, Dick can still see the angry red flush that's spreading from the tips of his ears down the back of his neck.

He bites down on a laugh that's sure to come out _completely_ hysterical. “Aw, come on, I only want a couple! Just the good ones!”

“Get out!” Jason shouts from down the hall.

“Who's gonna take care of Fabio if you die?!”

“ _Out_!”

 

**Author's Note:**

> i have no idea how to respond to comments so here's just a general _omgthankyouiappreciateitandlysmkisskiss_ for those who leave them  <3


End file.
